In addition to public key encryption, GPG can also be used to password encrypt files. This doesn’t use public/private key encryption but uses symmetric key ciphers like AES or CAST. This can be useful when you simply need to use a shared secret to encrypt or decrypt a file or if you are encrypting a file to yourself for safekeeping.

OpenSSL is cool and all but don’t use it to encrypt information in-situ. It’s a bad idea. OpenSSL is good for generating TLS certificates. It wasn’t intended for file encryption.
To encrypt a file named message.txt
: